The Black History of the White House

by Clarence Lusane

  That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?81

  By late 1864, Truth had become a great admirer of Lincoln, and that year she traveled from her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, to Washington, D.C. to gain an audience with him. She discovered that she would need someone to arrange the meeting and went to antislavery activist Lucy Colman, who turned to Elizabeth Keckly. Given her fortuitous position relative to the Lincolns, Keckly was able to set up the encounter, which took place in the early morning on October 29, 1864, at the White House. The meeting was thin in substance and more a courtesy call than a substantive discussion about the miserable condition and political future of the country’s millions of black people. Nevertheless, Truth writes fondly of the occasion, stating “I must say, and I am proud to say, that I never was treated by any one with more kindness and cordiality than were shown to me by that great and good man, Abraham Lincoln, by the grace of God president of the United States for four years more.”82 She noted that there were “colored persons” among those who were visiting Lincoln, including one black woman who needed help paying her rent.83 In expressing their mutual admiration for each other she told him that although she had never heard of him prior to his becoming the nation’s commander in chief, she considered him “the best president who has ever taken the seat,” and he “smilingly replied, ‘I had heard of you many times before that.’ ”84

  Sojourner Truth and Abraham Lincoln at the White House, October 29, 1864.

  Toward the end of their discussion, he showed her a Bible that had been presented to him as a gift by a group of black people from Baltimore. That moment was captured in a very famous picture of Lincoln and Truth together.

  As they ended their time together, Lincoln signed a book that she had brought with her, writing, “For Aunty Sojourner Truth.” For researcher Bennett, Lincoln’s calling Truth “Aunty” bolsters his assertion that Lincoln was not only policy-deaf when it came to black interests but harbored personal racist views as well.85 For Bennett, it does not matter if Lincoln meant it as a term of endearment, which was likely the case. For her part, Truth never complained about the term.

  Lincoln and Truth may have also met on other occasions. Lincoln made reference to other times that he had seen her, and it reportedly disturbed him when he discovered that on February 25, 1865, she had gone to the White House but had not been permitted to meet with him. 86 Like Keckly, Truth was interested in the welfare of black refugees from the war who were subsisting in the streets, alleys, and camps of Washington, D.C. On at least one of her trips to Washington, D.C., she sought to address the segregationist policies in the city even after slavery was abolished. She was also active in gathering food and clothing for black soldiers and civilians.

  Although she never met with Lincoln personally, Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman also sought to influence the White House. Born into slavery in 1822, she escaped while in her twenties and led approximately twelve successful raids to free enslaved blacks. During the Civil War, she served the Union army as a spy, a nurse, and the commander of a military raid—the first woman to take such a role—in which she and her troops sailed up the Combahee River, destroyed Confederate outposts, and liberated more than 700 black people.87 Tubman’s views on what Lincoln should do to win the war are quoted in an 1862 letter written by white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. The letter quotes Tubman, who refers to Lincoln as “Master,” saying:

  Earliest known photo of Harriet Tubman, taken when she was already established as the Moses of her people.88

  I’m a poor Negro but this Negro can tell Master Lincoln how to save money and young men. He can do it by setting the Negroes free. Suppose there was an awful big snake down there on the floor. He bites you. Folks all scared, because you may die. You send for doctor to cut the bite; but the snake is rolled up there, and while the doctor is doing it, he bites you again. The doctor cuts out that bite; but while he’s doing it, the snake springs up and bites you again, and so he keeps doing it, till you kill him. That’s what Master Lincoln ought to know.89

  Reflecting the views of blacks, free and enslaved, Tubman implored Lincoln to kill slavery once and for all.90

  Famous, little-known, and unknown African Americans all trekked to the White House to lobby Lincoln during his four-plus years in office. The issues on the table were substantial and often of national importance. Free blacks such as Keckly, and movement leaders such as Douglass and Truth, pioneered African American political access to the White House, and boundaries were redefined as new degrees of inclusion evolved. These encounters, developing in the context of profound national crisis, increased pressure on the reluctant president to see abolition as the only viable resolution. The cumulative impact of the chaos of war, massive escapes from slavery, agitation by abolitionists and free blacks, relentless pressure by Republican radicals, and, yes, the Emancipation Proclamation, all prepared the way for the formal end of slavery and a reconstruction of race relations in the United States. Lincoln walked an uneven, indirect, but successful path toward that end. He may have started his administration as an openly bigoted, colonization-promoting, politically averse, soft antislavery politician, but he evolved, reaching places that no U.S. president before him had dared go, and, it should not be forgotten, it cost him his life. Lincoln, in the end, evolved beyond the limits of his own political experiences and beyond the limits of the dominant political climate of his time.

  Ultimately, abolition happened both in spite of and because of Abraham Lincoln. The cautious, hesitant, and vacillating Lincoln finally succumbed to the era-changing, slavery-despising, liberal policy–initiating Lincoln. He challenged the doctrine of states’ rights, the political safety valve for the South in insulating slavery from federal intrusion. He initiated political relations with African Americans that had not existed previously. His meetings to discuss (or preach) policy implied a notion of respect for the political intelligence and strategic thinking of (some) black Americans, a posture no previous president had come near. In the end, it was the grand crisis of the Civil War that opened up the possibility of abolishing slavery once and for all, and Lincoln found himself in the position for it to occur on his watch.

  Reconstruction, Rise and Fall

  Lincoln did not live to see what some have argued was the most racially democratic epoch in U.S. history prior to the civil rights victories of the 1960s and 1970s: the period known as Reconstruction.91 In that era, constitutional amendments, congressional legislation, and presidential orders sought to give vigor to the policies needed to help the millions of newly freed black men, women, and families integrate successfully into U.S. society. The Freedmen’s Bureau—officially titled the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Land—was established by Congress in March 1865 as the main agency charged with addressing the educational, economic, medical, and other needs of Southern blacks. Offices were set up in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia in addition to the Washington, D.C. office.92 While the Freedmen’s Bureau did not distribute land confiscated from the Confederates to the newly freed, an earlier order did. On January 16, 1865, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman issued “Special Order 15,” which granted forty acres of arable land apiece to families on the coast of Georgia and the Sea Islands nearby. The families were also given some of the surplus mules that the army held.93 Access to land would be a key element in the survival a
nd independence of African Americans after the war.

  The radical Republicans who held sway in Congress immediately after the war were also able to push through the Thirteenth Amendment (December 6, 1865), which ended slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment (July 9, 1868), which gave the newly emancipated citizenship; and the Fifteenth Amendment (February 3, 1870), which granted voting rights to black men. Congress also passed civil rights acts in 1866 and 1875. The 1866 Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination in housing, allowed for blacks to make and enforce contracts, legalized black ownership of property, and made it legal for blacks to give testimony in court. These policies and others were essential to initiate repair of the damage that centuries of white-perpetrated enslavement and human trafficking of blacks had wrought.

  Actually, the program was carried out in two phases, known as Presidential Reconstruction (1865–1867) and Radical Reconstruction (1867–1877). In the first phase, the White House was seen as the principal driving force in developing, implementing, and enforcing policies that would benefit African Americans. While Lincoln may have demonstrated uncertainty and equivocation, his successor was clear where he stood: on the side of the Southern Confederates. In building what historian Doris Kearns Goodwin called his “team of rivals,” in 1864 Lincoln had chosen Tennessee Democrat Andrew Johnson as his vice president.94 White House doors that were opened to blacks by Lincoln were slammed shut by Johnson. As Frederick Douglass observed, “Whatever Andrew Johnson may be, he certainly is no friend of our race.”95 Johnson, a slaveholder prior to becoming president, acted immediately to restore and perpetuate white racial domination in the South. His personal views on race were hateful; he famously stated in Congress in 1844 that if blacks were given the right to vote it would “place every splayfooted, bandy-shanked, hump-backed, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, woolly-headed, ebon-colored Negro in the country upon an equality with the poor white man.”96

  The seventeenth president of the United States was openly racist, and his list of anti-black actions is long: Johnson failed to intervene when black voters and activists came under attack from white terrorist groups; advocated and gave pardons to unrepentant Confederates; ousted black employees from the Freedmen’s Bureau; rescinded Maj. Gen. Sherman’s order to give land to blacks; vetoed (re)funding of the Freedmen’s Bureau; and vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

  President Johnson did have meetings with black leaders. On February 7, 1866, he held an antagonistic talk with Frederick Douglass and leaders of the Convention of Colored Men. In August 1865, the Convention published a piece in the New York Times criticizing Johnson’s policies and stating that the president “in his efforts at the reconstruction of the civil government of the States, late in rebellion, left us entirely at the mercy of these subjugated but unconverted rebels, in everything save the privilege of bringing us, our wives and little ones, to the auction block.”97 The meeting was meant to discuss the role of the administration in protecting black voting rights, a subject the president largely dismissed. That gathering and other meetings of African Americans with Johnson were unproductive if not disastrous. After his conversation with Frederick Douglass, Johnson seethed, “Those damned sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap. I know that damned Douglass; he’s just like any nigger and he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.”98

  In response to the racism of the White House, during the second phase of Reconstruction the radicals took over and went to war with President Johnson. On March 2, 1867, Congress overrode Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Act, and in February 1868, it attempted to try to remove him from office. Offended that he had fired Lincoln’s secretary of war, radical Republican Edwin Stanton, in explicit violation of the Tenure of Office Act passed the year before, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly, 126 to 47, to impeach Johnson. However, even though a majority of Senators, 35 to 19, voted against the president, under the Constitution it took a two-thirds vote of the Senate to remove him from office. The Senate fell short by one vote. Nevertheless, Johnson was politically weakened for the remainder of his tenure.

  Given the radicals in Congress and the hostile political climate toward Johnson, one might have assumed that the Reconstruction agenda would continue. However, within a very short period, not only the White House but Congress would back away from the progressive policies that arose during Reconstruction, and a long period of neglect, compromise, retreat, and outright hostility toward the black community would set in.

  CHAPTER 6

  James Crow’s White House

  Prelude: Booker T. Washington’s White House Story

  A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation of Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage in many quarters.1—John McCain, concession speech, November 4, 2008

  Parker knocked the assassin down, And to beat him, he began it; In order to save the President’s life, Yes, the Negro truly was in it.—Lena Doolin Mason poem honoring James Benjamin Parker2

  The year 1901 was a pivotal and traumatic one for the White House. On September 6, Leon Czolgosz, an unemployed factory worker and fervent anarchist from Detroit, stood in front of the twenty-fifth president of the United States at the Pan-American World Fair in Buffalo, New York, lined up with others ostensibly to greet the president. When his turn came, instead of shaking hands, Czolgosz fired two bullets at President William McKinley. One bullet knocked a button off McKinley’s jacket, hitting his right breastbone but not penetrating further. The second shot pierced the president’s abdomen and struck his liver and pancreas.

  Panic ensued. Leaping into action, James Benjamin Parker, a large man who was standing immediately behind him in line, hit Czolgosz hard in the face. Parker’s move prevented the assassin from firing a third shot.3 Czolgosz, who was of Polish heritage, was eventually subdued by Parker and the late-reacting Secret Service and other police assigned to protect McKinley. Reportedly, at least one Secret Service agent was distracted by focusing on Parker, an African American, ignoring Czolgosz and failing to detect the concealed gun he had just fired. Arguably, McKinley may have never been shot if Parker were not being racially profiled during the moment Czolgosz revealed his weapon.

  In truth, by preventing Czolgosz from squeezing off a third shot, Parker might have saved McKinley’s life. Although the president was seriously injured, competent medical attention should have prevented the wound from being fatal. However, the medical team that worked on McKinley made a number of critical errors and the president died eight days later as result. First, the medical team failed to use an X-ray machine that was available nearby, so they never located or removed the bullet that struck McKinley’s stomach. Second, the doctor who performed the surgery to remove the bullet, Matthew Mann, was a gynecologist and an obstetrician who had never worked on a gunshot wound. Lastly, failure to drain the wound properly led to gangrene and infection that eventually killed McKinley. Initially, the president was recovering and expected to live, but he took a turn for the worse a few days later and passed on the morning of September 14, 1901.

  James Benjamin Parker became a national hero in the black community overnight. Dozens of newspapers in both the black and white press ran stories about his daring intervention.4 He was honored with awards, and pieces of the clothes that he wore when the incident happened were reportedly given or sold to strangers. Well over six feet tall, the forty-four-year-old Parker was an imposing figure. Known as “Big Jim,” he hailed from Atlanta but was working as a waiter in Buffalo at the time of the assassination.5

  In this period of American history, racial segregation and lynchings were increasing as white backlash against African Americans gained momentum. The Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist groups were permitted to flourish. Only five years earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case that racial segregation was legal, thereby codifying into national law the “black codes” of exclusion that arose in the South during Reconstruction. George Henry White, a
Republican from North Carolina and the only black remaining in the U.S. Congress in 1901, was departing.

  Parker’s spontaneous but unsuccessful effort to protect the president was held up by many blacks to demonstrate the sacrifices that African Americans were willing to make as citizens even if the nation sought to treat them as second-class and unequal. Parker himself humbly stated, “But I do say that the life of the head of this country is worth more than that of an ordinary citizen and I should have caught the bullets in my body rather than the President should get them. . . . I am a Negro, and am glad that the Ethiopian race has whatever credit comes with what I did. If I did anything, the colored people should get the credit.”6 It is unknown how many other African Americans felt the same way about giving up their life for the president, but it was clear that, Parker’s charitable words notwithstanding, black racial pride and American national identity were at that moment in an unhappy marriage.

  In official history, however, Parker was excised from the trial and downplayed in the Secret Service account of the assassination. Embarrassed that they had been upstaged, the agency desperately sought to hide the fact that they had failed on the job. Parker was not called to testify in the court that convicted Czolgosz, nor was it even mentioned that he had played a central role in capturing the president’s assassin.7 Before the trial, Secret Service agent Samuel Ireland told the Associated Press, “That colored man was quicker than we. He nearly killed the man.”8 In his testimony at the trial, along with that of Secret Service Agent George Foster, he denied any role for Parker in the event. Foster, who like Ireland had earlier stated that Parker helped capture Czolgosz, said under oath, “I never saw no colored man in the whole fracas.”9 As the Atlanta Constitution editorialized, “White men claimed all the credit, and only the names of white men were remembered.”10 There is no record that McKinley was even told about James Benjamin Parker’s deed before he perished.